How to Advertise on Facebook

It is obvious that social media marketers can use Facebook advertising to their advantage. You can’t deny Facebook is where the people are. In fact, Facebook contains the largest concentration of people interacting on the web than anywhere else. It stands to reason you can potentially reach more people with a Facebook ad than perhaps a television ad, and it’s cheaper, too.

What follows are some benefits of advertising your brand on Facebook:

You have targeted advertising. Facebook allows for you to choose your target audience rather than sending your message to people who have no interest in your brand. Because Facebook collects information about the people using the platform, it has a better ability to target advertisers to the people who can benefit from them the most. Your Facebook ad can even target by age or geographic location.

You can add new fans and Likes. A Facebook ad campaign drives targeted traffic to your brand page for Likes and interaction.

You can change your ad around as needed. Facebook ads allow you to change headlines, wording, and images, as well as track your campaigns to see what’s working.

You can reach friends of fans. Your ad will also show up in the sidebars of the friends of people who liked your page. So if you have 200 fans and they each have 100 friends, you can reach 20,000 people.

As with any campaign, before you start using Facebook advertising, first take the time to determine who you’ll be targeting and what you want your end result to be. Is it to drive traffic to your website? Drive sales? More Likes? These are some of the things to think about before creating your Facebook ad.

Next, think of a variety of content for your ads. For example, different headlines, text, and images. You may be tempted to create an ad and leave it up all this time, but the same old ad gets boring. If you don’t change around the content of your ad from time to time, not only will people become tired of it, but it can become invisible after a while.

People don’t come to Facebook to read ads. They come to Facebook to share, interact, and play. So your ad has to catch their attention; otherwise, it’ll just become sidebar noise. Your choice of headlines shouldn’t be obnoxious, but it should be enough to catch the attention of someone who is on Facebook for other reasons.

Also, because the image on your ad is something that people will see more than once, take some time to choose something pleasant over shock and awe. If you don’t choose an image, Facebook will choose one for you. So do yourself a favor and choose an image that sets the right tone.

When you have a variety of ads worked out, test them and see which ones work best. Because you can change your ads any time you want and Facebook gives you the ability to check performance, you can play around with a variety of ads and stick with the ones that work best.

Another thing to keep in mind is that Facebook offers a variety of pricing for advertisements, so options are available for all budgets. Don’t worry about spending a lot of money out of the gate.

Instead, wait until you see how the ads are performing before investing a lot of money. You don’t want to throw good money at poorly performing ads. After you find the text/title/image combinations that work best, you can raise the amount of money you want to spend, if you feel it’s important.